Overview of Managing Access Permissions to Your
AWS SSO Resources

Every AWS resource is owned by an AWS account, and permissions to create or access
the
resources are governed by permissions policies. An account administrator can attach
permissions
policies to IAM identities (that is, users, groups, and roles). Some services (such
as
AWS Lambda) also support attaching permissions policies to resources.

Note

An account administrator (or administrator user) is a user with
administrator privileges. For more information, see IAM Best Practices in the
IAM User Guide.

When granting permissions, you decide who is getting the permissions, the resources
they
get permissions for, and the specific actions that you want to allow on those resources.

AWS SSO Resources and Operations

In AWS SSO, the primary resources are application instances, profiles, and permission
sets.

Understanding Resource Ownership

A resource owner is the AWS account that created a resource.
That is, the resource owner is the AWS account of the principal entity
(the account, an IAM user, or an IAM role) that authenticates the request that creates
the
resource. The following examples illustrate how this works:

If the AWS account root user creates an AWS SSO resource, such as an
application instance or permission set, your AWS account is the owner of that
resource.

If you create an IAM user in your AWS account and grant that user
permissions to create AWS SSO resources, the user can then create AWS SSO resources.
However,
your AWS account, to which the user belongs, owns the resources.

If you create an IAM role in your AWS account with permissions to create
AWS SSO resources, anyone who can assume the role can create AWS SSO resources. Your
AWS account, to which the role belongs, owns the AWS SSO resources.

Managing Access to Resources

A permissions policy describes who has access to what. The
following section explains the available options for creating permissions
policies.

Note

This section discusses using IAM in the context of AWS SSO. It doesn't provide
detailed information about the IAM service. For complete IAM documentation, see
What Is IAM? in the
IAM User Guide. For information about IAM policy syntax
and descriptions, see AWS IAM
Policy Reference in the IAM User Guide.

Policies that are attached to an IAM identity are referred to as
identity-based policies (IAM policies). Policies that are attached to
a resource are referred to as resource-based policies. AWS SSO supports
only identity-based policies (IAM policies).

Identity-Based Policies (IAM
Policies)

You can attach policies to IAM identities. For example, you can do the
following:

Attach a permissions policy to a user or a group in
your account – An account administrator can use a
permissions policy that is associated with a particular user to grant
permissions for that user to add an AWS SSO resource, such as a new
application.

Attach a permissions policy to a role (grant
cross-account permissions) – You can attach an
identity-based permissions policy to an IAM role to grant cross-account
permissions. For example, the administrator in Account A can create a role
to grant cross-account permissions to another AWS account (for example,
Account B) or an AWS service as follows:

Account A administrator creates an IAM role and attaches a
permissions policy to the role that grants permissions to resources in Account
A.

Account A administrator attaches a trust policy to the role
identifying Account B as the principal who can assume the role.

Account B administrator can then delegate permissions to assume
the role to any users in Account B. Doing this allows users in
Account B to create or access resources in Account A. The principal
in the trust policy can also be an AWS service principal if you
want to grant an AWS service permissions to assume the
role.

For more information about using IAM to delegate permissions, see
Access Management in the
IAM User Guide.

The following permissions policy grants permissions to a user to run all of the
actions that begin with List. These actions show information about an AWS SSO
resource, such as an application instance or permissions set. Note that the wildcard
character (*) in the Resource element indicates that the actions are allowed
for all AWS SSO resources that are owned by the account.

Resource-Based
Policies

Other services, such as Amazon S3, also support resource-based permissions policies.
For example, you can attach a policy to an S3 bucket to manage access permissions
to
that bucket. AWS SSO doesn't support resource-based policies.

For each AWS SSO resource (see AWS SSO Resources and Operations), the service defines a set of API operations.
To grant permissions for these API operations, AWS SSO defines a set of actions that
you can
specify in a policy. Note that performing an API operation can require permissions
for more
than one action.

The following are the basic policy elements:

Resource – In a policy, you use an
Amazon Resource Name (ARN) to identify the resource to which the policy applies.
For AWS SSO resources, you always use the wildcard character (*) in IAM
policies. For more information, see AWS SSO Resources and Operations.

Action – You use action keywords to
identify resource operations that you want to allow or deny. For example, the
sso:DescribePermissionsPolicies permission allows the user
permissions to perform the AWS SSO DescribePermissionsPolicies
operation.

Effect – You specify the effect when
the user requests the specific action—this can be either allow or deny. If
you don't explicitly grant access to (allow) a resource, access is implicitly
denied. You can also explicitly deny access to a resource, which you might do to
make sure that a user cannot access it, even if a different policy grants
access.

Principal – In identity-based policies
(IAM policies), the user that the policy is attached to is the implicit
principal. For resource-based policies, you specify the user, account, service,
or other entity that you want to receive permissions (applies to resource-based
policies only). AWS SSO doesn't support resource-based policies.

Specifying Conditions in a Policy

When you grant permissions, you can use the access policy language to specify the
conditions that are required for a policy to take effect. For example, you might want
a policy
to be applied only after a specific date. For more information about specifying conditions
in
a policy language, see Condition in the IAM User Guide.

To express conditions, you use predefined condition keys. There are no condition keys
specific to AWS SSO. However, there are AWS condition keys that you can use as appropriate.
For a complete list of AWS keys, see Available Global Condition Keys in the IAM User Guide.

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